Clearing the Baffles for 911

By Wayne Madsen – October 3, 2005

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The French discovery of a Bosnian connection to two of its nationals at Darounta is noteworthy. The Muslim operation in the Balkans was largely supported by official (CIA, DIA, and Special Operations) U.S. assistance but also by unofficial help. This was mainly carried out by private military contractors like MPRI and financial support networks like the Bosnia Defense Fund, established in the mid-1990s at a Riggs Bank account in Washington, DC. The principal movers behind the Bosnian Defense Fund were Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. In fact, Feith’s law firm, Feith and Zell (FANZ) set up the Bosnia Defense Fund. According to a former Riggs legal adviser, when objections were raised about the hundreds of millions of dollars collected from such countries as Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Malaysia, the UAE, Iran, Jordan, and Egypt that were being detected by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) being sent from Washington to Sarajevo, Bosnia, and reports that there was “spillage” of these funds into the hands of Al Qaeda units in the country, Perle’s response at one contentious meeting was, “just make it fucking happen.”

After 911, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill attempted to pressure banks and other financial institutions in Dubai and Saudi Arabia to provide records of past and ongoing Al Qaeda financial transactions. According to a former auditor with the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, during a trip by O’Neill in March 2002, the UAE and Saudi officials shook O’Neill’s hand, smiled at him, and offered to assist. However, they soon put pressure on the Bush administration, including several leading neo-cons who knew the stakes of such disclosures, to force Paul O’Neill out. Later that year, in December, Bush forced O’Neill to resign. A November 29, 2001 letter from Treasury Department General Counsel David D. Aufhauser to Swiss Procurator General Claude Nicati described the measures the Treasury Department was taking against a major Al Qaeda financier named Yassin A. Kadi. However, that particular thread intersected with activities by Islamist guerrillas in Bosnia, and that was a threat to certain neocon elements who had established a Bosnian support fund in the 1990s that involved the same financial support networks that supported Al Qaeda. In fact, Al Qaeda units were active in Bosnia during the civil war. And those units were partly supported by the Bosnia Defense Fund established by Perle and Feith…………..http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/oldsite/print.asp?ID=3655&Pictures=Off

This is a scalable context timeline. It contains events related to the event Before October 1997: $400 Million Bosnian Defense Fund Fuels Balkan Conflict. You can narrow or broaden the context of this timeline by adjusting the zoom level. The lower the scale, the more relevant the items on average will be, while the higher the scale, the less relevant the items, on average, will be.

Douglas Feith, a neoconservative (see Early 1970s) serving as a Middle East analyst for the National Security Council, is fired after becoming the focus of an FBI inquiry into his giving classified NSC information to an Israeli embassy official in Washington. [CounterPunch, 2/28/2004] (Feith has always been a hardline advocate for Israel; his father, Dalck Feith, was a hardline Republican who, in his youth, was active in the militant Zionist youth movement Betar, the predecessor of Israel’s Likud Party. Both Feith and his father will be honored by the hard-right, Likud-aligned Zionist Organization of America.) [Inter Press Service, 11/7/2003] In 1992, Feith will write of his belief that the US and Israel should freely share technology; author Stephen Green will write regarding Feith’s leak of classified information to Israel that “what [Feith] had neglected to say… was that he thought that individuals could decide on their own whether the sharing of classified information was ‘technical cooperation,’ an unauthorized disclosure, or a violation of US Code 794c, the ‘Espionage Act.’” Feith is almost immediately rehired by fellow neoconservative Richard Perle to serve as Perle’s “special counsel” (see Mid-1982); Feith will work for Perle until 1986, when he forms what Green will call “a small but influential law firm… based in Israel.” [CounterPunch, 2/28/2004]

Neoconservative Richard Perle, the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, hires fellow neoconservative Douglas Feith as his special counsel. Perle soon promotes Feith to deputy assistant secretary for negotiations policy. Feith’s hire is the latest in a long tradition of neoconservatives such as Perle giving each other influential government positions (see 1973 and 1981). [CounterPunch, 2/28/2004]

Fourteen nations, including the US, support a $400 million “Bosnian Defense Fund,” which reportedly collects cash and equipment contributions for a “train and equip” program that is operated by the US. [Arms Trade News, 10/1997] According to investigative journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval Officer who has worked with the NSA: “Via something called the Bosnia Defense Fund, these countries [Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, Brunei, Jordan, and Egypt] deposited millions of dollars into US coffers to buy weapons for the Bosnians…. According to Washington K Street sources, the law firm that established the Bosnia Defense Fund was none other than Feith and Zell, the firm of current Pentagon official and leading neo-con Douglas Feith. Feith’s operation at Feith and Zell was assisted by his one-time boss and current member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle.” [CounterPunch, 9/18/2003]

The long-awaited Dutch government report on the Bosnian war has been released. Elsewhere we discuss the so-called massacre in Srebrenica (1), dealt with in the report. But aside from Srebrenica, the report has very important things to say about US cooperation with and sponsorship of Islamist terrorism in Bosnia. This is discussed in the Guardian article, below.

The Guardian gave their article the title: „America Used Islamists To Arm The Bosnian Muslims.“

This is misleading. The U.S. did not support *all* Bosnian Muslims, it supported the faction led by Alijah Izetbegovic. Izetbegovic is a Muslim fundamentalist who began his political career supporting the Nazis during World War II. (2)

During the fighting in Bosnia, Muslims were sharply divided between pro and anti-Izetbegovic factions. Many anti-Izetbegovic Muslims allied with the Bosnian Serbs. The Western media labeled these people, „Muslim Rebels.“ But Izetbegovic’s Islamist faction was referred to as „the Muslim-backed government in Sarajevo.“

(In olden times, a priest officiated in the coronation of a European king. But in Bosnia, a government was created by the Western media.)

Even among Muslims, one could argue that Izetbegovic was not the leading politician. In the 1990 elections, the biggest vote-getter was Fikret Abdic. And it was Abdic who led the anti-Islamist Muslims who were allied with the Bosnian Serbs. For more on Mr. Abdic, see the article, „Pro-Yugoslav Muslim Leader Put On Trial,“ athttp://emperors-clothes.com/docs/abdic.htm

America Used Islamists To Arm The Bosnian Muslims
The Srebrenica Report Reveals The Pentagon’s Role In A Dirty War

By Richard J Aldrich

The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, released last week, contains one of the most sensational reports on western intelligence ever published. Officials have been staggered by its findings and the Dutch government has resigned. One of its many volumes is devoted to clandestine activities during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. For five years, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University has had unrestricted access to Dutch intelligence files and has stalked the corridors of secret service headquarters in western capitals, as well as in Bosnia, asking questions.

His findings are set out in „Intelligence and the war in Bosnia, 1992-1995“. It includes remarkable material on covert operations, signals interception, human agents and double-crossing by dozens of agencies in one of dirtiest wars of the new world disorder. Now we have the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims – some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in „the war against terrorism“. Pentagon operations in Bosnia have delivered their own „blowback“.

In the 1980s Washington’s secret services had assisted Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. Then, in 1990, the US fought him in the Gulf. In both Afghanistan and the Gulf, the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation – in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Wiebes reveals that the British intelligence services obtained documents early on in the Bosnian war proving that Iran was making direct deliveries.

Arms purchased by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia made their way by night from the Middle East. Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft. The report stresses that the US was „very closely involved“ in the airlift. Mojahedin fighters were also flown in, but they were reserved as shock troops for especially hazardous operations.

Light weapons are the familiar currency of secret services seeking to influence such conflicts. The volume of weapons flown into Croatia was enormous, partly because of a steep Croatian „transit tax“. Croatian forces creamed off between 20% and 50% of the arms. The report stresses that this entire trade was clearly illicit. The Croats themselves also obtained massive quantities of illegal weapons from Germany, Belgium and Argentina – again in contravention of the UN arms embargo. The German secret services were fully aware of the trade.

Rather than the CIA, the Pentagon’s own secret service was the hidden force behind these operations. The UN protection force, UNPROFOR, was dependent on its troop-contributing nations for intelligence, and above all on the sophisticated monitoring capabilities of the US to police the arms embargo. This gave the Pentagon the ability to manipulate the embargo at will: ensuring that American Awacs aircraft covered crucial areas and were able to turn a blind eye to the frequent nightime comings and goings at Tuzla.

Weapons flown in during the spring of 1995 were to turn up only a fortnight later in the besieged and demilitarised enclave at Srebrenica. When these shipments were noticed, Americans pressured UNPROFOR to rewrite reports, and when Norwegian officials protested about the flights, they were reportedly threatened into silence.

Both the CIA and British SIS had a more sophisticated perspective on the conflict than the Pentagon, insisting that no side had clean hands and arguing for caution. James Woolsey, director of the CIA until May 1995, had increasingly found himself out of step with the Clinton White House over his reluctance to develop close relations with the Islamists. The sentiments were reciprocated. In the spring of 1995, when the CIA sent its first head of station to Sarajevo to liaise with Bosnia’s security authorities, the Bosnians tipped off Iranian intelligence. The CIA learned that the Iranians had targeted him for liquidation and quickly withdrew him.

Iranian and Afghan veterans‘ training camps had also been identified in Bosnia. Later, in the Dayton Accords of November 1995, the stipulation appeared that all foreign forces be withdrawn. This was a deliberate attempt to cleanse Bosnia of Iranian-run training camps. The CIA’s main opponents in Bosnia were now the mojahedin fighters and their Iranian trainers – whom the Pentagon had been helping to supply months earlier.

Meanwhile, the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs. Mossad was especially active and concluded a deal with the Bosnian Serbs at Pale involving a substantial supply of artillery shells and mortar bombs. In return they secured safe passage for the Jewish population out of the besieged town of Sarajevo. Subsequently, the remaining population was perplexed to find that unexploded mortar bombs landing in Sarajevo sometimes had Hebrew markings.

The broader lessons of the intelligence report on Srebrenica are clear. Those who were able to deploy intelligence power, including the Americans and their enemies, the Bosnian Serbs, were both able to get their way. Conversely, the UN and the Dutch government were „deprived of the means and capacity for obtaining intelligence“ for the Srebrenica deployment, helping to explain why they blundered in, and contributed to the terrible events there.

Secret intelligence techniques can be war-winning and life-saving. But they are not being properly applied. How the UN can have good intelligence in the context of multinational peace operations is a vexing question. Removing light weapons from a conflict can be crucial to drawing it down. But the secret services of some states – including Israel and Iran – continue to be a major source of covert supply, pouring petrol on the flames of already bitter conflicts.

Richard J Aldrich is Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. His ‚The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence‘ is published in paperback by John Murray in August.

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.

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Meet “Al Qaeda”

“Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to ‘punish’ Prime Minister Erdogan for being a ‘toot tepid’ Islamic politician.

” . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact ‘rogue states,” specially the US and other NATO countries.

” Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the ‘liberal” economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.

“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.”

In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel’s case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel’s character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system “got him” for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group.

It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of “Al Qaeda.” We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

French officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about “Al Qaeda” — Another target of the neo-cons.

The Jihad system of all actions and activities that Muslims perform in pursuit of the triumph of their religion has become especially interesting for its warrior version. In European horizon it obtains the characteristics of the holy war. Under the influence of the ideas of globalization the Muslims should also be involved in that project and the idea of Jihad consequently became an obstacle. Therefore the Euro-US media trend was to ignore and neglect that idea. There was also a misapprehension that neglecting would make this problem disappear.

The situation in Yugoslavia was similar. The Muslim media advocated that idea, as well as the majority of the non-Muslim population. As a result, this phenomenon remained completely unexplored or misinterpreted which finally yielded bad results of the globalization itself.

US-supported Bosnian Muslims, in suits, in meeting with international Jihadist volunteers in Bosnia some of whom took part in 9/11 attacks in New York.

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Dr. Jevtic is a Professor at the Belgrade University of Politology of Religion and an author of many books analyzing the influence on Islam on politics and war.

„Independent“ Kosovo: Gangland Spills Savagery Worldwide

By Anna FilimonovaThursday, 20 Sep 2012

The Western power centers use the „Republic of Kosovo“ as a testing ground for working out the ways to create a quasi-state that could be defined as an abnormal criminal case of global scope. The final goal is reshaping the whole of South East Europe. (www.strategic-culture.org)

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The merger of Albanian mafia involvement in drug trafficking along with international terrorists and radical Islamist groupings is a special case to talk about. Al Qaeda units were based in Kosovo and Metohija during the Kosovo conflict. Bashkim Gazidede, a former head of Albanian secret police unit, headed the organization’s Balkans branch. Muhammad Rabee al-Zawahiri, the brother of Ayman al-Zavahiri, the current Al Qaeda leader, was one of Kosovo Liberation Army commanders. (7) Now Kosovo has become a training center of Syrian militants. The Syrian «opposition» asked the Kosovo Liberation Army for help in April 2012. It promised the recognition of Kosovo by «new Damascus» in return. The terrorist KLA leaders and Islamic extremists from Bosnia and Herzegovina rendered «support» in training Syrian paramilitary groups. Dzevad Galiashevic, member of expert team for South East Europe in fight against terrorism, claims the training centers are still based in the previous KLA locations, including the territory of Macedonia. Abdussamed Bushatlic, a former Al-Mujahedeen militant, a Wahhabi movement leader in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was among those who were seen there. According to Galiashevic missionary and ideological activities are conducted in Macedonia, Kosovo is a place of military preparatory activities. All terrorist activities are done under the patronage of NATO- led Kosovo Force (KFOR). The training camps are located in Drenitsa (the hamlet of Likovats, Yablanitsa and Glodjana). There are new training facilities built for mujahedeen from Muslim countries. One of them is situated in Drenica, another in Metohija (the hamlet of Smonitsa near Djakovica. Zoran Stijovic, former Serbian State Security officer in the 1990s, says the training is conducted for two types of operations: subversive-terrorist activities and intelligence gathering. The instructors are not Albanians only, the export model of Syrian revolution is prepared with the help of CIA operatives, Albanian KLA terrorists and the extremists from Bosnia and Herzegovina. (8) On June 20 2012 the Syrian army started a battle for the second largest city Aleppo, there were 400 «rebels» liquidated. The identification of the dead showed Kosovo Albanians fought on the side of terrorists along with the mercenaries from other countries.

It seems to be unexplainable; while the Western intelligence services «beat the drums» and tell breath taking details about local and international scale «operations» of Albanian criminals’, the Western political circles and international bodies seem to ignore the activities that threaten the security of their own countries…

A new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report is challenging the US claim that Assad forces used chemical weapons in an attack last August, highlighting that the range of the improvised rocket was way too short to have been launched from government controlled areas.
In the report titled “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence,” Richard Lloyd, a former UN weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), examined the delivery rocket’s design and calculated possible trajectories based on the payload of the cargo.
The authors concluded that sarin gas “could not possibly have been fired at East Ghouta from the ‘heart’, or from the Eastern edge, of the Syrian government controlled area shown in the intelligence map published by the White House on August 30, 2013.”
Based on mathematical calculations, Lloyd and Postol estimate the rocket with such aerodynamics could not travel more than 2 kilometers.
To illustrate their conclusion, the authors included the original White House map that depicted areas under Assad control and those held by the opposition. Based on the firing range and troop locations on August 21, the authors conclude that all possible launching points within the 2 km radius were in rebel-held areas.
Moreover, the UN spokesman for the Secretary General, Martin Nesirky said Wednesday that the UN does not have information about a new chemical weapons attack in Syria, Itar-Tass reports.
On Wednesday Syria’s National Coalition accused government troops of using poison gas in an attack on the rebel-held town of Daraya near Damascus.
At least three people were killed in the attack, the group alleged in a statement.

Basayev was a key part of the CIA’s Global Jihad. In 1992, he met Saudi terrorist Ibn al-Khattag in Azerbaijan. From Azerbaijan, Ibn al-Khattab brought Basayev to Afghanistan to meet al-Khattab’s ally, fellow-Saudi Osama bin Laden. Ibn al-Khattab’s role was to recruit Chechen Muslims willing to wage Jihad against Russian forces in Chechnya on behalf of the covert CIA strategy of destabilizing post-Soviet Russia and securing British-US control over Caspian energy.

Once back in Chechnya, Basayev and al-Khattab created the International Islamic Brigade (IIB) with Saudi Intelligence money, approved by the CIA and coordinated through the liaison of Saudi Washington Ambassador and Bush family intimate Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar, Saudi Washington Ambassador for more than two decades, was so intimate with the Bush family that George W. Bush referred to the playboy Saudi Ambassador as “Bandar Bush,” a kind of honorary family member.

Basayev and al-Khattab imported fighters from the Saudi fanatical Wahhabite strain of Sunni Islam into Chechnya. Ibn al-Khattab commanded what were called the “Arab Mujahideen in Chechnya,” his own private army of Arabs, Turks, and other foreign fighters. He was also commissioned to set up paramilitary training camps in the Caucasus Mountains of Chechnya that trained Chechens and Muslims from the North Caucasian Russian republics and from Central Asia.

The Saudi and CIA-financed Islamic International Brigade was responsible not only for terror in Chechnya. They carried out the October 2002 Moscow Dubrovka Theatre hostage seizure and the gruesome September 2004 Beslan school massacre. In 2010, the UN Security Council published the following report on al-Khattab and Basayev’s International Islamic Brigade:

Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was listed on 4 March 2003. . . as being associated with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of” Al-Qaida. . . The Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was founded and led by Shamil Salmanovich Basayev (deceased) and is linked to the Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs (RSRSBCM). . . and the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR). . .
Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=137_1431761148#bo3vceHbfdqO0tga.99